


One Thing, and One Thing Only

by th_esaurus



Category: X-Men (Movies), X-Men: First Class (2011) - Fandom
Genre: AU, M/M, Nazi hunters
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-24
Updated: 2013-02-24
Packaged: 2017-12-03 11:46:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,638
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/697919
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/th_esaurus/pseuds/th_esaurus
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Charles clambers gracefully down the ladder, smoothes down his shirt, takes his place by Erik’s side. “Gerhardt Hindler,” he says.</p><p>The poor fool on the floor fumbles to his feet, poised like a starving tiger. His hair is matted, his beard bristly and unkempt. “How in God’s name did you find me?” he croaks.</p><p>“Rather easily,” Charles says, without moving his lips.</p>
            </blockquote>





	One Thing, and One Thing Only

Erik demands to hear what Charles knows of him, and all Charles can answer is the truth. 

+

It is filthy hot, the spoils of summer bleeding into the golden autumn months when the world is crisp and blinding outside the shadows; still and humid and cave-like under the greenish-blue topiary of their treetop cover. Charles recalls aloud a nineteen-year-old summer he and Raven spent on the southern French coast, she perfecting her vision of feminine beauty and he trying to fathom why his pale skin only ever burnt under the sun. “I couldn’t tan for salt,” he says amiably, grasping onto an overhanging branch to lever himself up the steep, dry incline, his footfalls closer together than Erik’s, his legs not quite as long. “Raven had a rather steady string of suitors as I remember. We were sharing a suite at the time.”

Charles hikes up onto a molehill of dry rock that crumbles underfoot. Erik uses his watchstrap to steady him, a mental grip before he can give Charles a real hand. He helps Charles find his balance, and Charles picks out a few pebbles stuck into the bottom of his boot, and they carry on.

“Have you spoken to her?” Erik asks, after a pause too long to be a natural gap in the conversation.

“Not since Panama,” Charles says, and Erik smiles a dog-sharp and grim smile at the memory. They had made the acquaintance of a deeply-voiced German who had a resonant sort of laugh that made quails bustle skittishly out of the bushes, and who was looking for a high-class forger in official documents. They met him in the elegant beer garden of a lantern-lit tavern, neither far from the border nor the coast. 

It had not been a chance meeting.

“Yes,” Charles says disdainfully, sifting through Erik’s memories like he would a picture album. “Well.”

The day has been long and Charles is starting to tire. He tells Erik about a machine Hank had constructed – Hank, Charles has to remind him, the young scientist, the gently gigantic wunderkind – that they were planning to adapt to Charles’ gift, a machine that would let him wrap the tendrils of his mind around half the world. “It would have been useful,” Charles says wistfully. “For keeping in touch.”

“You write to her.”

“Yes, but it’s a tad futile without a return address, isn’t it?” For his leaden footsteps and quiet breathlessness, Charles doesn’t sound at all tired when he speaks. Erik turns back to glance at him, and his mouth is red and parted and soft as a watercolour. 

He hasn’t been speaking aloud for at least an hour.

“Your passive-aggressive charm can be so trying,” Erik says lightly. He does not ask Charles if he has regrets.

“Of course, my friend,” Charles says, just as breezy. It could be the answer to everything, or the answer to nothing at all.

+

Erik announces abruptly that they won’t make their destination by nightfall, not by a long shot. They veer back down the hillside towards the road, or what passes for one at least, and walk single file on the verge, waiting for traffic. It’s late, and scant. Erik’s shirtsleeves are rolled up under his armpits, bunched in with sweat in the creases and around the low split of his collar. Charles’ trousers are rolled up ridiculously below his knees, a white slice of skin knitting together the black cotton and his dusty black boots. There are lira in one of Erik’s pockets, and a dirty German coin stamped with insignia both sides in the other. They look distinctly outsider. 

Charles could make everyone believe they blend as much as spit in the ocean. Erik doesn’t mean to degrade him, but he has—specific benefits. 

They talk as they stroll, politics and art and genetics, Charles spilling words like waterfalls as though he’s trying unconsciously to make up for all the walks Erik took alone. Enough conversation for a lifetime. He has bought, even, a small chessboard, poorly carved in tupelo, which he keeps tucked in his backpack, the pieces in a velvet draw-string pouch. Erik had argued they’d never play. 

“A life without mental stimulation is a very poor life indeed,” Charles had tutted.

“And chess is the best you could come up with?”

“Work with me, dearest,” Charles had replied fondly. 

Charles has a vision of some idealistic, young Utopia, where humans and mutants live in Tolstoyan harmony, neighbours, brothers, sweethearts. He knows how Erik feels about such things. “You don’t feel a hypocrite?” Erik says, when he’s had enough.

A young girl cycles swiftly past them, the spokes of her wheels rattling shamelessly as she weaves past in a cloud of sugary dust. Erik feels the push and pull of the metal around him, much as, he suspects, Charles can feel the pinprick niggle of another psyche. 

“A means to an end,” Charles says lightly. Eventually.

Erik knows his own end is vengeance. He can read Charles well enough to know that’s not his aim. He can’t read him well enough to know what is.

+

They hitchhike a lift on the back of a bustling little farm truck. Erik speaks to the driver in conversational Italian; Charles’ words are English, as far as he can tell, but the driver responds to him just the same. When he offers them a homecooked dinner with his wife and a sparse room for the night, Erik raises his eyebrow at Charles. 

“Yes, yes,” Charles replies tetchily. 

The world begins to yawn around them as they rattle down the track, the sun peering blearily down into the horizon. The air is thick, submerged in water, and Erik’s hands feel too warm in his pockets, the coin solid against his palm. Charles leans his head on Erik’s heavy shoulder, his hair a pillow and Erik’s muscle a buffer against the jolt of the Apennine roads. 

It’s not unpleasant. 

There’s never been any point in discussing Erik’s past, his homeless, borderless existence between the end of the war and the advent of Charles. Charles knows every inch of him, every second of his past and present framed so openly for Charles to examine, an unbidden visitor in the vast and complex museum of Erik Lensherr’s whole life. It did rather expunge the need for reminiscent small talk. 

All the people who have ever known anything of Erik are dead. Charles shifts against his shoulder, his mouth slipping down Erik’s collarbone to press at his neck. He pulls back abruptly, blinks like he’s waking. “Excuse me,” he murmurs. 

+

Their dinner is rustic but welcome. The farm is mainly cows and they dine on beef shoulder, carrots, asparagus, a wonderfully over-risen lemon sponge for dessert. Charles offers their host a healthy shot of the good brandy he keeps in a silver flask in his kit. Their host’s wife shows them upstairs to the attic room, bundles of blankets and down pillows in her arms, and apologises for the sole bed and bare trappings. They kiss her cheek, thank her, bid her goodnight. Charles unlaces his shoes, and then kneels on the floorboards, and pulls Erik’s off for him. They lie, side-by-side, on the single bed. Erik rummages in his bag and pulls out a well-marked map, consults it briefly; trusts Charles’ opinion more.

“We’re close?” Erik asks, swift as a papercut. 

Charles closes his eyes for a moment, presses his fingertips to his temple. Erik half thinks that’s a performance that turned into habit. “Yes,” he says. “We’re close.”

The map is folded and slotted back into place, in a dog-eared card folder that still reads Shaw, Sebastian across the front, crimson print running faint from wear.

Sebastian Shaw, incidentally, is dead. He died by Erik’s hand, in a considerable amount of pain. Charles is fiercely aware of this particular agony; he held Shaw in place while Erik fulfilled his destiny, pinned him like a grotesque moth and felt every shuddering, sobbing, shattering nerve ending. Erik had not cleaned the blood from his hands before he cradled Charles’ broken little body in his arms. “Forgive me,” he had begged. He had kissed Charles. Had kissed him so many times and Shaw had watched them with his dead eyes, blood coating his eyelashes. “Forgive me.”

“Yes of course,” Charles burbled. He hadn’t been sure what he was absolving Erik of this time. 

When Charles was somewhat recovered, Erik had said they’d use a different method next time. Charles would be relegated to interrogator. “Or moral support, if you so wish,” Erik offered. It had been the most explicit opt-out he’d given Charles since this whole escapade began. 

“I’m sure I shall have my uses,” Charles had said, smiling mildly. 

Sebastian Shaw is dead and Erik considers their objective more a clean-up job these days. Picking up the last few shards of broken china.

Erik unbuckles Charles’ belt with his hands. He likes the feel of metal between his fingers, something, oddly, he doesn’t feel often. When his trousers are done with, Charles climbs over Erik’s thighs like a mountaineer, settling himself there with his sweat-damp shirt, unbuttoned to the navel, and his rouged-up cheeks. He gets so pink when they make love. Erik asked him about it once and Charles muttered, “English propriety,” but it was never a complaint. 

Charles lets his mind seep out beyond their thin walls, lulling the house into deep sleep and deeper silence, and grasps onto the bedstead with both hands. 

+

They don’t dally around in the morning. Erik wakes with Charles wrapped around him like a blanket, and kisses the open curve of his lips once, then whispers him awake. Charles has never been a morning person, petulant and nocturnal when the sun is just rising, but he’s getting better, forgetting his Virginia four-poster bed and adjusting to Erik’s haphazard sleeping habits. 

They wash from a thankfully lukewarm dish of water propped on the windowsill, skip breakfast, accept the offer of a handful of bitter little apples from their host, and are on the road again by nine. Heading towards the mountains, following a trail of breadcrumbs that nobody else can see.

Charles hums Chet Baker as they climb. His stiff white collar and black browline shades sing of summers riding through Suffolk forestry, lounging on St. Tropez decks, cocktails and brogues and one-night stands. This is hardly an accurate description of Charles Xavier, but Erik wonders if it could have been. In another life, where Erik was alone and Charles the pinnacle of normality. 

“You’re fretting,” Charles says, mid-whistle.

“I never asked you to come with me,” Erik says, not turning back to look at him.

“Nevertheless,” Charles says breezily, “here I am.”

He had turned up two days after Erik left the CIA. Two days after Charles told Erik that he knew everything about him. Erik had been poring over Shaw’s confidentials in a ramshackle motel just outside Idlewild Airport, an economy ticket to Latvia in his briefcase and a promise of safe passage into Russia in a brown envelope on his bedside table. Charles had knocked on his red woodchip door and put down his case and commented sprightly that the room was very—functional.

They had fucked like teenagers on the lumpy, noisy mattress. Erik asked him what on earth he was doing, as they lay warmed by their own afterglow. 

“I need to help you,” Charles said, very honestly.

“You think you can redeem me?”

“Yes.”

“I’m going to find them all and kill them, Charles.”

“My friend,” Charles had said, turning to kiss Erik. “If that’s what it takes.”

+

They reach a copse where the trees are thin and the ground softer, not too distantly unsettled. Charles sets down his backpack and sits on a wide, flat rock, catching his breath, and Erik lifts up his trouser leg, checks the dagger nestled between his boot and his skin, notes the time on his watch, runs his fingers through his hair. 

“You know, you don’t have to— ” Charles starts, and Erik stops him with a glance. Charles does have to try, every damn time. “Yes. I thought as much.” He offers his palm and Erik takes it, and as Charles pulls himself up he plants a soft kiss on the back of Erik’s hand, just above his knuckles. With his sleeves pulled up in this weather, the ink scratched into Erik’s skin is so vivid. 

Erik finds the bunker door on his hands and knees, brushes the dirt from his trousers as he stands and grips the force of the steel door under the muffling earth. It’s just like swinging open a heavy door by the handle, and his brow creases but there’s no more exertion than that. The ground shifts in a damp landslide, unoiled hinges creaking under the unexpected strain and pebbles ricocheting off the ladder rungs, clattering down into the dimly lit shaft.

There is no immediate movement from inside the bunker. “After you, my dear,” Charles murmurs.

Erik can feel the gun pointed at his back before his eyes adjust to the darkness; he flicks it into the air as easily as brushing away a fly. The bunker smells close to rancid, a tin pail in the corner and the stench of rotting food, off milk, worse, permeates everything. Erik crinkles up his nose in distaste. There is a pile of well-thumbed books, German and English and one Italian, scattered next to a threadbare mattress on the floor. There is a flash of shadow and an animal noise as the bunker’s sole occupant scrabbles on the metal floor for his pistol, and Erik lifts the toe of his foot, slides the gun to settle neatly underneath it. 

Charles clambers gracefully down the ladder, smoothes down his shirt, takes his place by Erik’s side. “Gerhardt Hindler,” he says.

The poor fool on the floor fumbles to his feet, poised like a starving tiger. His hair is matted, his beard bristly and unkempt. “How in God’s name did you find me?” he croaks.

“Rather easily,” Charles says, without moving his lips.

Erik puts out his palm and the knife in his boot shoots upwards, the handle making a neat little slap as it hits his skin. “Your old friends aren’t good at keeping secrets,” he says easily. He flicks his wrist and the floor around Hindler’s feet crumples like paper, rends the air with an awful screeching, traps him in unmoving quicksand. The coin in Erik’s pocket shivers with the ripples. The man’s mouth gapes open and closed in silent horror, his limbs twitching in pre-emptive rigor mortis. “I wonder if you’re any more loyal than they are.”

+

There’s a bubbling brook not far from the wreck of the bunker, not clean but enough for Erik to scrub his hands and his knife down. Charles dabs his fingertips wet, thumbs a few crimson specks from Erik’s jaw. They sit by the stream and munch on a few of their apples, too sour to really enjoy them.

“Where next?” Erik asks.

“Your choice,” Charles replies, chewing thoughtfully. “He certainly was a popular man in his day. Acquaintances all over the shop. Budapest is probably the closest, and a particular favourite of mine. Stunning architecture, you know.”

Erik washes his hands again, shakes them dry, finds his map. Crosses off one mark, makes another. Charles offers up a few more locations, all noted on the map. As they lean in close, Charles presses his hand lightly to Erik’s temple. 

Erik closes his eyes, and a very long time passes, and then he opens them, and stands up, and offers Charles a hand, and Charles takes it. Always does. “Come along,” Erik says. 

Charles always does.

+

Erik demands to hear what Charles knows of him, and all Charles can answer is, “Everything.”


End file.
